New study debunks notion that immigration causes crime

Ramon Ruiz was deported after going to San Bernardino's USCIS office for an interview and adjustment of status application. (May 25, 2017)
Omar Ornelas/The Desert Sun

In this Feb. 9, 2017, photo provided U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE agents at a home in Atlanta, during a targeted enforcement operation aimed at immigration fugitives, re-entrants and at-large criminal aliens.(Photo: Bryan Cox/AP)

New research on the relationship between immigration and crime dispels the notion that more immigration leads to more crime, according a pair of academics who spent three years analyzing two decades of studies on the subject.

“For me, I’m done asking about whether immigration causes crime," said University of California, Irvine criminologist Charis Kubrin, one of the authors of a study released Tuesday. “In my mind, this meta-analysis closes the book on that question.”

Kubrin and Graham Ousey, a sociologist at William & Mary, analyzed more than 50 studies and 500 findings while writing Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Contentious Issue for the The Annual Review of Criminology.

The most common findings in the studies they reviewed were that there is no relationship, meaning immigration doesn’t causes crime to go up or down. In the studied where immigration and crime had a relationship, immigration actually led to a decrease in crime, according to the data.

This is the first meta-analysis on the subject and researchers consider their finding a definitive debunking of the narrative that immigration causes crime, a notion that the U.S. government has used to justify shifts in immigration policy.

“So many of the current executive orders and policies are based on this idea that immigration causes crime,” Kubrin said. “But that narrative is simply false.”

The meta-analysis allowed Kubrin and Ousey to compare different types of academic studies published between 1994 and 2014. Longitudinal studies, those that look at decades of data, were more likely to determine that more immigration causes less crime. Cross-sectional studies, those that look at a much shorter time frame, tended to show no relationship.

The longitudinal studies carry more weight, Kubrin said, because they have more data points and span through a period of decades.

The studies reviewed in the meta-analysis categorized crime and immigration in different ways. For example, some focused on violent crime or property crime. Others looked at the foreign-born population or those who had only been living in the country for a few years. Kubrin and Ousey’s research included immigrants who are in the country legally and illegally.

The study reviewed whether immigration in various cities and states across the country led to higher crime rates in those areas. It did not measure whether immigrants were committing more or fewer crimes than the native-born population.

Other research has shown that immigrants are less crime-prone than people born in the U.S.

Although the study shows overwhelming consensus that there is no link between crime and immigration, and when there is a relationship it is a negative one, the research doesn’t tell us why.

Kubrin hopes to answer that question with future research.

Immigration Reporter Gustavo Solis can be reached at 760 778 6443 or by email at gustavo.solis@desertsun.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @journogoose.